Gamergate And The Unbearable Maleness Of Computers

The global toilet paper industry is booming. Total sales in 2012 were worth around $45 billion, a 7% increase on 2011, driven in large part by growth in Brazil and China. By contrast global revenue from apps sold on the App Store and Google GOOGL -0.68% Play was $18.5 billion in 2012, according to a report from Gartner . In another report, the global sale of videogames, not including hardware, was worth a little more than $41 billion in 2012. The manufacture and sale of toilet paper around the world is worth more money and serves far more people than the sale of videogames.

This is the first comparison that comes to mind when thinking about the hostility and aggression that is enacted in the name of the videogame industry. The last couple months have produced a string of hallucinatory acts of abuse, with a bomb threat to Utah State University leading to the cancellation of a speech by Anita Sarkeesian, host of a series of videos cataloging patterns of gender characterization in videogames. Last week, game developer Brianna Wuleft her home after someone on Twitter posted her address alongside a threat to rape and murder her with a knife. The trade site Gamasutra, which I wrote for as a freelancer between 2009 and 2012, lost an advertising account with Intelafter an organized campaign of complaints about an editorial written by my friend Leigh Alexander arguing that the “gamer” was no longer the most economically and culturally valuable demographic in the industry.

These acts of harassment, intimidation, and emotional abuse have been loosely organized around the banner of Gamergate, a stupefying port manteau taken from the name of a hotel associates of the Nixon campaign paid to have burgled. Though self-appointees of the Gamergate movement see themselves as the virtuous party, their tactics have mirrored the criminality, dirty tricks, and obscurantism of its namesake, deploying a network of anonymous and almost exclusively male group of men to harass a small number of women working in the games industry, a communal effort that seems to have no other goal than making shared space so hostile that none but them would ever want to use it.

We have met the enemy and he is us. Image via Depression Quest website.

The movement used the alleged sex life of Zoe Quinn as its sawhorse, taking a lengthy blog post with copious screen captures of correspondence between Quinn and her ex-boyfriend as prompt to attack her in every way possible through the Internet. As is often the case in the videogame world, isolated acts quickly morph into all-encompassing bodies of mass antagonism toward anything outside the mass. And so the claim that Quinn had slept with a reporter to secure favorable coverage of a game she was giving away for free and which he never actually wrote about became a rhetorical permission slip to unleash a wave of aggression against anyone who fit in the paradigm of outsider. Gamergate adherents found the same sins reproduced in anyone they looked at, sweeping up people as disparate as Rami Ismail, Ben Kuchera and Mattie Brice into a network of covert agents. The games media should be treated as sacrosanct, they argued, because its audience of guileless male shoppers can so easily be tricked into buying a game against their wishes.

I cannot see how what little cultural history games have wouldn’t be irrevocably impoverished by the absence of the people Gamergate targets. Writing about games would be far worse off without Leigh Alexander’s reporting on everything from The Copenhagen Game Collective to her beautiful experimental writing about the games press itself. And though I disagree with many of her interpretations, Anita Sarkeesian has done an enormous amount to challenge the pathologies of gender representation in games, making the connection between boilerplate characterizations and mass market industrialization more visible than any critics before her. Zoe Quinn has contributed to an exciting generation of designers willing to experiment with confessional design and expand the emotional range of games beyond the traditional frustration-exhiliration loop. There is no argument that game culture would be improved by the absences of any of these people, or the countless others unnamed here.

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In a way, Gamergate adherents have rightly identified videogames, and the media that supports them, as an avenue of exploitation in their lives. Videogames are about avoiding people, and when they make human interaction compulsory they do so through a computerized intermediary that reduces everyone to symbolic units. When communing through the keyhole of digital systems, the more autonomy one side shows the more intruded upon the other’s efforts to build a narrative of identity and significant action, straining the credibility of the frail subjectivity on which those self-deceptions depend. Gamergate is a collective response to an epochal narrowing of human experience to the point where the only things we care to defend are consumer goods, distraction apparatuses whose reassuring simulations of progress and accomplishment must be sanctified because they can no longer imagine living without them.

Computers are the end result of a long process of human communities attempting to rid themselves of one another, creating machined instances where each person can live in a harmonious composition of their own choosing. Those who’ve made different choices can only have done so out of a delusional misunderstanding of reality. In all their vainglorious rules and affirmations, videogames are proof that one thing is right and everything else is not. Compulsively playing them is the lonesome refuge of those most alienated from the processes of thought, community, and politics that have produced the particular set of values they claim for irrefutable truth. Those that most fear the artificiality of their beliefs require violent repudiation of those who disagree with them. Enacting these punishments only deepens the social isolation and emotional alienation that makes an objective rubric of hierarchical truths seem so necessary, creating an emotional and communal destitution that videogames need as precondition in order to be seen as meaningful. And though it may be the warp of my own experiential lens, I have always found the men disproportionately drawn to these structures of mediated self-abandonment. History is rotten with men and the wreckage of their empirical discipline, a worm that only ever metamorphoses into another kind of worm through the centuries.

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Videogames are a theoretically free and neutral form of play run through computers, something that promised to consolidate and surpass all previous forms of creativity into an interactive superset of human expression. Why play benefits from translation to computer logic has never been clear. Our understanding of computers has disproportionately favored advocacy lines about their revolutionary benefits, as if evil things can’t also have interesting uses, and that the distracting novelty of the good in an foul invention often preys on the most intimate needs in its users. Computers are neutral objects in the same way that scissors are—they can be anything but they work best when used in a particular way, keeping a user’s attention fixed on a single screen. And while computers transmit vast oceans of knowledge, experience, and expression through that single portal, the mode of presentation ensures there is more excluded from each individual transmission than would be in another form. Videogames have become the emotional justification for computers as the central components in our lives and their development across generations a wellspring of hope for the best kinds of human exchange and empathetic experience, while in reality they have produced a reliable supply of pacifying distractions, the most popular of which can require dozens or hundreds of hours to reach basic competence.

Intel-sponsored game tournament in Poland. Image via Wikipedia.

That this culture of mass avoidance could be susceptible to ethical breaches is self-evident, but the suggestion that this comes from women writers or developers is exactly the wrong way around. The ethical breach in the games industry is the mass exclusion of women, trans people, or anyone who is not openly and vehemently male. When communities are defined through digital media, the absences created by systemic exclusion become a repository for neurotic insecurities, forming communal bonds out of a mass need to never acknowledge the vulnerabilities, flaws, or fears. Gamergate is the philosophical rubble of those who cannot countenance the fact that they may be wrong. There is no environment more welcoming to this mentality than the digital, where withdrawal is instantaneous and feelings of threat or aggression can be instantly transformed into action without forethought. There is no need for compromise on the Internet. Respect for the existence of two equally valuable but non-complimentary truths is fundamentally incompatible with the nested logic of computers, which are as useful for building intimacy and social bonds as are scissors for spreading cake frosting.

Gamergate has assembled itself not as a movement of introspection and self-confession. Instead it’s become a neurotic rejection of any possible shortcoming, calling for the absolute refutation of those who fill in its absences, creating a huge storm of triggering abuse for those it defines as outside of it. It has left in its wake a paradox of using a simulative medium as catalyst for social action, with a mass consensus that those responsible for Gamergate’s worst actions cannot be allowed to continue, but no practical way to stop them. This is a central feature of the digital, to create new kinds of problems for which the medium has no fundamental capacity to correct, all in service of deepening its users’ dependence on the medium.

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I remain skeptical about the value of game culture as a political constituency, even if it one day becomes as welcoming and expressively diverse as the consumer in me would like. I don’t believe that if there were more games like Gone Home or Depression Quest it would be easier to process a rape kit in Houston or access an abortion clinic in Alabama. If we put up a better fight for political and legal recognition of all non-males in the world, creative culture would become a lot more varied of its own accord, and through many more forms than the commercial channels and vaguely hostile platforms we’re stuck with today. It seems to me, the computer is the commercial exploitation of centuries of social disintegration, and I have no faith that videogames will play a meaningful role in improving our shared present anymore than changes to the toilet paper industry would.

It’s a trap to think our warped tools of mass production have the capacity to make us better people, when the tools themselves have been designed to minimize our human interdependencies. But these are just thoughts, and I wouldn’t want to fight anyone over them. I’m wrong all the time, and there has been nothing more changeable in my life than the flow of thoughts. The only salvation I have had from self-infatuation with my own limited thoughts has come from other people, and though it sometimes feels like falling into vacuum of all-consuming relativism, there are few things I attach more value or intimacy to than disagreement, and the implicit bond it affirms, embodying an affection and commitment that supersedes symbolic compatibility.

Videogames are the digital simulation of being overcommitted to a single line of thought, they betray us to ourselves, revealing not just our wishes to be free of others and the consequent paranoia that our wishes might come true. Though I have never called myself a gamer, I remember well the years of my life when loneliness in the face of an opaque future made the dirty kennel of videogame websites and message boards a regular part of my day. It was the mid-2000s when either the industry was smaller of my own understanding of it was. The times accommodated my relentless fascination with things that didn’t yet exist with a swell of rumors and predictive analyses about the coming generation of still unrevealed console machinery. The variety of creative achievements in the games already released felt unassailable—Half-Life 2, Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari Damacy, Nintendogs, Rez, Cave Story, Dwarf Fortress, Seaman, MetalGear Solid 2, Pikmin 2, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!. Yet, there was a sense of smallness about this commercial canon, these were but first or second attempts at a depth and variety that would only flourish once freed from the constraints of old processors and merged with the untested possibility of new control devices.

I spent my days watching the anonymous personae of a few hundred boys and men lap over one another like waves in an imaginary pond. There were hierarchies and a strangely warped sense of egalitarianism that always seemed present in communities of men, where intimate admissions were generally off-topic and inappropriate, but hostility and criticism allowable so long as it occurred in the emotional vacuum of corporate machinery. We had no control over these things we expected to fulfill us, but we pretended in a charade of logical arguments built out of safely branded words like Capcom, framerate, Fumito Ueda, and normal mapping. You could call it a culture, but it was more of a participatory elegy for our own preempted lives, surrendered in advance for a pottage of depersonalized amusements. We needed only to invent a narrative of cultural significance for our passivity, the minimum required for the ennoblement of our mutual defeat. No one needs an org chart more than the lost.

As the years passed I stopped drawing emotional comfort from these corners and looked at them less and less. But every time I peeked back in they seemed unchanged, the same personas playing their parts, even if the people operating the avatars had changed. The future we had hoped for never arrived. We got new things, but none of them resembled anything we’d imagined. Still, there was always another horizon to peer over, another machine on the way, another game yet to be announced, a new kind of controller or headset that no one had ever seen before.

When I go into a GameStop I sense the same inbred union of male despair and pride, an emporium of emotional trinkets that come in dingy plastic boxes, each one covered with a fading label that says, “Used.” The people who need these things are always sadder in real life, the crowing self-congratulation on the headset shrinks into something fidgety and afraid of making eye contact when it’s a human body before you. The oceans of poverty, abandoned educations, and communities that have no relationships with crit theory or semiotics are often the ones lectured to by all sides, shamed into nonparticipation in educated culture because they use the same thoughtless words as their friends, have made peace with what’s available in their occupied cities, and do not pine for more than their share of underwhelming present, a used copy of God of War 3 or Call of Duty: World at War four years after the fact. I am skeptical of any politics that makes these people enemies or obstacles.